Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  I leaned forward and gently squeezed his wrist.

  “Sorry, what’s your name again?”

  He faltered momentarily, then looked flattered. “Andrew,” he said.

  “Andrew.” I smiled sweetly at him. “Hi.”

  * * *

  —

  After dinner, the night proceeded in the usual fashion. Joe ordered an UberXL and we all piled in, tacitly arranging ourselves so that those who had the likeliest chance of fucking later that night were closest to one another. When we arrived at La Boîte, Andrew grasped my hand as I stepped out of the car, an unnecessary act of chivalry that both stirred me and made me think less of him. It was already past midnight and there was a long line outside. Dozens ballooned out near the door, ignoring the line: men in fedoras insisting they were on the list, drunk girls whining into their cellphones, Can you come out and get me pleaaase?, others just looking shamefacedly at their shoes. Ignoring them all was Michael, the tall, elegant black man who managed the door at La Boîte. He was happily chatting away with one of the stout bouncers who acted as his muscle, but, true to his preternatural talents, he glanced up just as we were approaching the melee and, with one fluid motion of his hand, parted the crowd. Walking through those sweaty hopefuls to casually kiss Michael on the cheek and disappear beyond the graffittied metal door, my sense of worth skyrocketed.

  I can’t recall exactly what happened next, but as I said, it was a regular night: we can assume that within minutes of walking through the door, the eight of us were comfortably ensconced in one of La Boîte’s semicircular booths, which were tastefully upholstered in pale-gold velvet, and within another minute, one of us, probably Joe, cracked open the bottle of vodka waiting in its ice bucket and began pouring. I wouldn’t remember this if it weren’t for the photographs posted on Instagram the next day, but apparently we had developed an ongoing joke that we were all, in equal turns, in love with our waitress and made embarrassing overtures to her with little regard for how she might have felt about our intrusive attentions. There are several photos of us mooning over her, including one where Joe is on bended knee, as if proposing, and one where Julia is wrapping her arms around the server’s waist. In the back of one of them, I’m nuzzling Andrew’s neck. I don’t remember that either.

  Soon, we would have gotten up to dance. Or, in any case, at some point we found ourselves on the dance floor, perhaps better characterized as the tiled space between the booths and the main bar, a massive marble job with the bottles all lit, pink and gold, behind it. This, at least, I remember: Blake, Julia, and me dancing, bodies loose with booze, the lights sliding over our faces, reminding me of the bottom of the ocean the time I went scuba diving in Anguilla, the way the light refracted through the water to create a subtle strobe effect along the ocean floor. I felt I was swaying in the current. Julia’s hands were above her head, her wrists swiveling as she made slow semicircular turns with her ass; Blake, who had been raised on jazz and tap-dancing classes, punched and kicked the air aggressively to the beat. We were dancing with each other, yes, but we were also putting on a show; I closed my eyes and imagined us as glimpsed from afar, through the crowd. With each languorous turn of my hips, I felt I was drawing eyes towards us, irresistibly, as if on an invisible string. There was a rushing sensation inside of me. I opened my eyes slightly and looked at the crowd through a sultry, half-lidded gaze. People were looking. I wondered if Andrew was. I scanned the crowd, looking for him. My eye caught instead on a particular shoulder, smooth and white in the strange light, like a river rock, just brushed with a tousle of blond curls. I craned my head to get a better look, and at that moment she turned her head, quickly and nervously, as if to find someone in the crowd. Somewhere inside of me a bell rang. Gemma. It was Gemma! My whole body seemed to swim in the proximity of her image, and I had to blink—hard and fast—to maintain my equilibrium. I had often fantasized about seeing her in person, had in fact viewed it as an eventuality, yet now, in the presence of her corporeal reality, the sensation was uncanny, the way it is when you finally visit a famous monument or painting after having seen thousands of images of it, an unnerving blend of familiarity and novelty that made everything feel unreal, as if the presence of the thing flattened everything into the two-dimensional realm in which you’d so often engaged with it. Gemma waved to someone on the other side of the dance floor, and her face broke into a smile. I was relieved to notice she was not more beautiful in person. But she did have a haunted, hunted quality to her expression, and a way of carrying herself that reminded me of other famous people I’d seen, a way of holding her head up high, looking only at what was directly in front of her—nothing in her peripheral vision—which simultaneously acknowledged and ignored the fact that everyone in the room was looking at her.

  “What’s the matter?” Julia asked.

  I realized I’d been standing stock still, staring off into the distance. I shrugged my shoulders, trying to appear casual. “I just saw Gemma Anton.”

  Blake was too involved in her performance to take note, but Julia looked around curiously.

  “Over there.” I pointed, but Gemma had been swallowed up by the crowd. “Oh, you can’t see her anymore, but she’s there.”

  Blake, noticing the two of us talking, forever paranoid that she should miss something between us, however minute, stopped her show. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Mickey thinks she saw her girl crush.”

  “She’s not my girl crush,” I snapped.

  Julia smiled and tilted her head like, sure, sure, whatever you say, and Blake asked if I was talking about Gia Ronaldo, an actress I used to like but now hardly even remembered and certainly wouldn’t care about seeing, which just goes to show you how much Blake knows about anything.

  Julia rolled her eyes. “She’s talking about Gemma, duh.”

  Blake scanned the crowd. “I don’t see her.”

  “I didn’t either,” said Julia. “It was prob just some other blond chick. God knows they’re a dime a dozen.” She said it sarcastically, while bugging her eyes out at me, trying to be funny.

  “It was definitely her.” Frustrated, I pulled up Instagram and went to her profile. She’d posted only thirty minutes ago: she was lying in bed, wearing a thin cotton t-shirt through which you could see her erect nipples; Charles Bukowski’s Hot Water Music covered half her face. The one eye that did show looked out mischievously. The caption read: Raging night in.

  “See?” said Julia.

  “It wasn’t her,” said Blake.

  But I knew it was.

  * * *

  —

  The thing most people don’t understand about going out and getting wasted every night is that it’s not easy. It’s not always fun. It can be hard work. It takes discipline. It takes substances. Of course, we’d been doing bumps all night, turning to one another and ducking our heads to inhale off keys at the booth, in the back of the Uber. But I’d reached a point where I knew I needed more than that: a big fat line to myself. Remember, I was not sleeping well in those days, and so I was often tired by two in the morning, just when the night’s unhinged sense of possibility was reaching its peak. Without saying so, I’d looked for Gemma. I’d walked the perimeter of the dance floor, peered into all the banquettes. I supposed she had left. Still, I wanted to stay, because seeing her felt like an omen. It meant I was somewhere where things could happen. But now I was sequestered in a booth with Andrew, leaning in close, my eyelids beginning to droop. He was off, again, on some soliloquy about Montauk, how he liked to surf, his childhood in New England, a difficult father, yada yada. I listened only enough to give vague responses. Yes, totally, you’re so right. Finally, when it seemed he was letting up, I excused myself for the bathroom, feeling I was close to passing out. He tugged on my hand.

  “Don’t be long,” he said.

  There was a large bathroom with six stalls on the other side of the d
ance floor, but if you were a regular—and no doubt I was—you knew there was also a smaller, two-stall bathroom down a short set of stairs near the coat check. It was often empty and therefore cleaner, quieter. There’d been nights when Julia, Blake, and I had all but commandeered it, pouring out lines right there on the sink countertop—marble, like the bar—not even bothering to go into the stalls. We loved that bathroom. As I snaked my way through the dance floor and the inevitable crowd huddled near the bar, then past the coat check girl, framed in her little window like a painting, just as stuck and stationary, I hoped that the bathroom was empty. It was. I wasted no time: I slipped into the first stall and, with a practiced economy of movement, poured out a sprinkle of coke on my faux-gold cosmetic case and snorted. It hit my brain like soda water bubbling up to the top, making those little snaps and pops.

  On my phone, I stared at the image of Gemma in bed. It was the same image. But I kept staring at it as if my intense scrutiny might have the power to make it morph and reveal something new. I spread my fingers over the cool, glassy surface, zooming in until the edges of Gemma’s face grew blurry and I could make out the freckles and uneven skin along her cheeks.

  She was lying. I knew she was here.

  I felt a tingling of anger. Maybe that’s what made me do it. A feeling not so much of betrayal, but of moral outrage. Gemma was not allowed to be a liar. I wanted to show her that.

  Or maybe it was the coke and the seven vodka sodas that did it. In any case, I can’t now claim I was thinking straight. I clicked Message on her profile, and my screen opened up onto a blank vista: uncharted territory. The white space encouraged me. It was impersonal, and at the same time intimate: it was the same white space in which Blake and Jules and I exchanged stupid memes, or my mother sometimes sent me little inspirational quotes. I wasn’t really expecting a response; she didn’t even follow me, it would go right to her slush pile of DMs. Still, my heart hammered in my chest knowing that the message would be waiting for her, should she happen upon it. It would be waiting there forever in her inbox, a place I knew very well did not exist physically but which nonetheless seemed in closer proximity to her. And perhaps she would see it. Anything was possible with this device in my hand, everything reachable and identifiable, all of us equalized by the algorithm. Gemma was savvy; maybe she made a point to respond to messages in order to keep engagement up. Regardless, I knew I was going to do it, and I knew what I was going to say, too. An older guy I was hooking up with in high school had given me a copy of Hot Water Music, believing, I think, that I would be impressed with his taste in literature. He told me his favorite quote from the whole book was Bukowski’s advice to young writers: “Drink, fuck, and smoke plenty of cigarettes.” He wrote this on the title page in pen. It was the only part of the book I read. The guy stopped texting.

  I wrote to Gemma: I read that book in high school. And to prove to her I had, I quoted my ex-boyfriend’s favorite line. Then I wrote: Wish I was at home reading it, instead of at La Boite. Funny, actually, because I thought I saw you here tonight…

  My thumb hovered over the Send button. Jason’s words kept running through my head: Who are you? Are you sweet? Are you earnest? Sarcastic? Ballsy?

  Someone came into the bathroom, startling me and making me feel claustrophobic. I deleted the ellipses and added an exclamation mark. My heart was beating faster. Am I funny? I added lol to the beginning of the message. I could see the girl’s feet in the stall next to mine, pale in Chanel ballet flats, watching me. I deleted all the punctuation, removed all capital letters, and, before I could change my mind, hit Send, hoping that the lack of grammar would make me seem insouciant and cool.

  I took a long time washing my hands. The girl came out of the stall and stopped short. I met her eyes in the mirror. We both started, our mouths forming little ohs, and then the girl’s face darkened and she rushed out.

  * * *

  —

  It took me only a moment to realize. My hands were still wet, the tap still running. I had been in the same room as Gemma and I had let her go, had only stared at her in the mirror like an imbecile. I went out to see if I could catch her before she disappeared into the crowd, not even bothering to dry my hands, just wiping them against my jeans. I made my way through the tumult, straining my eyes to pick out any of her distinguishing features through the crush of bodies.

  “There you are!” Andrew cupped my shoulder and smiled like he wanted to eat me.

  “Here I am,” I said distractedly.

  “I was looking for you!” He handed me a vodka soda.

  I mashed the straw until it was a narrow slit, then sucked hard at it, while continuing to scan the crowd. Andrew gently led us away from the crush that had gathered around the bar, towards an open nook between the booths and a potted plant.

  “I just wanted to say—thanks for listening earlier.”

  “Of course.” I kept replaying the moment in my head. Looking for clues in her face.

  “How old are you again?”

  “What?”

  “How old are you again?”

  “Eighty-two.”

  He laughed. “No, seriously.”

  “Nineteen.”

  He whistled. “Man, nineteen. Nineteen. Fuck.”

  My vodka soda was almost finished and I shook it gently like a little bell, the ice cubes rattling. I was thinking of Gemma looking at me. I was thinking of her reading the message I had sent. When she made the connection, if she made the connection, I would look like a stalker. I would look malicious. I didn’t know which was worse: Gemma thinking ill of me, or Gemma not noticing me at all.

  “You’re an old soul,” Andrew said, interrupting my thoughts. He wagged his finger at me as if to say I got your number. “The way you process pain…it’s beyond your years. I just feel like you really got me, you know.”

  I almost wanted to slap the poor man in the face. Instead, when he leaned in a second later, I let myself be kissed. I let his mouth expand over mine until our teeth were mashing, and I bit his lip and pressed my body against his, as one flings herself off a cliff.

  * * *

  —

  The next thing I remember, I was in Andrew’s bed and we were having sex. I felt badly for dozing off. It wasn’t his fault. I was so drunk, everything felt dull and numb. The only thing I could feel was the sharp metal of my bra strap digging into my back. So I started moaning. Soft at first. Just so he wasn’t offended. But after some time—it might have been one minute, it might have been fifteen—I had somehow fallen asleep again.

  I forced myself awake with a jolt and screamed: “I’m cumming!”

  That put an end to it.

  Afterwards, he crawled up to me on his elbows and kissed me on the cheek, obviously pleased with himself. I knew I had to leave soon. I have a rule about sleepovers: I don’t do them. But I was already under the spell of sleep. My body felt weighed down, and the idea of flinging it up and out of doors felt impossible, brutal. Let me doze just for a little, I thought. Twenty minutes. Then: Uber.

  “Hey.” Andrew nudged me.

  I mumbled something, half asleep.

  “Don’t fall asleep on me now!” he said playfully, nuzzling my neck. I groaned. “Tell me something about you. I want to know everything there is to know about Nicky.”

  I laughed.

  “What! I’m curious. I feel like I just talked your ear off all night.”

  Oh, the poor idiot. I started the clock in my head. “What do you want to know?”

  “Where’d you grow up?”

  “All over.”

  “Like where?”

  I sighed. “Virginia, Texas, California. One year in Mexico. Most of high school was in Santa Fe.”

  “Army brat?”

  “Just poor. My dad died when we were little.”

  He made a regretful clucking sound with his tongue and
stroked the top of my head. Men are so gullible; they believe whatever phantoms they project onto your face. I ask: How can I respect a species so easily deceived? “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “My mom raised the five of us, which is crazy for me to think about now. I don’t know how she did it.”

  “She must be one strong lady.”

  “She is.”

  “And your siblings?”

  “Four brothers.” I yawned and turned on my side, and Andrew wrapped his arm around me and I thought about my fictitious brothers and felt safe. “I’m the baby. So you can imagine how protective they are. They’d probably kill you if they knew about this.”

  “I better be careful then.” He nudged my earlobe with his nose. Sixteen minutes.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t bother. You’re as good as dead already.”

  He turned me over, and ran his palm against my face. “I’ll take my chances.” He kissed me and I tasted salt. “Nicky James. What a woman you are.”

  I left shortly afterwards. Outside, it was gray and bleary: the sun was just starting to rise. I heard birds chirping and pretended not to notice. My Uber driver’s name was Jesus, a handsome thirtysomething with dark, tired eyes. I wondered what he’d think if he knew where I’d just come from, what I’d been doing: appalled or turned on?

  You’re in a take-charge cycle for career and responsibilities, dear Aquarius, but today’s energies may pull you back a little. Kylie Jackson, a former Disney star, did a pole dancing routine in a music video for Jay Real, a white pop star, and the Internet couldn’t decide if it was co-opting black culture or promoting pedophilia (Jackson was fifteen) or if it was actually totally okay, avant-garde even, but I was jealous of the way she looked in the screenshot, her breasts straining against the teal Lurex of the self-consciously trashy bikini top. I wondered if she had implants; if she did, they were good. Julia had posted an image to her Stories of Blake and me on the dance floor. In a series of quick taps, I dispatched one of the Quick Reactions that had popped up on my screen as suggestions, not even really paying attention to which one I selected, because it didn’t matter, they’d all been equally vetted by the algorithm.